Arte-non-Vi

Category: Innovation; Media

  • Data + Design [2]

    Data + Design

    Yes, a repeat from WhaleSongServices, but I think it is worth it.

    I am proud to be a part of the launch of Data + Design @DataDesignBook. A free, open source e-book made by 50+ contributors from around the world!!

    For anyone and everyone that has ever struggled with making data accessible, struggled to use evidence to improve planning or simply grappled with the best way to display an important message to a class, an audience or a colleague; this is the resource for you!

    A new e-book from Infoactive co-founder and CEO Trina Chiasson and Northwestern University Statistical Analyst Dyanna Gregory will take the mystery out of collecting and using data to tell stories using visually engaging tools and techniques.

    The free e-book explains important data concepts in plain language, helping readers learn how to collect, prepare and visualize data through examples that they can relate to, understand, identify with and remember.

    “Data + Design” was created for people looking for a friendly introduction to data — journalists, teachers, nonprofit leaders, business professionals and marketers — who want to improve their ability to identify and collect meaningful data and present it as visually engaging stories.

    More than 50 volunteers [ of which I am one] from 14 countries worked on the e-book, which began during a February write-a-thon supported and sponsored by RJI.

    Read it, use it and share it!

    Links

    About the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute

    The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute works with citizens, journalists and researchers to strengthen democracy through better journalism. RJI seeks out the most exciting new ideas, tests them with real-world experiments, uses social science research to assess their effectiveness and delivers solutions that citizens and journalists can put to use in their own communities.

    About Infoactive

    Infoactive was named Best Bootstrap Company at the 2013 SXSW Accelerator competition. The firm was incubated at Cossette, Canada’s largest marketing agency, and is a graduate of the FounderFuel startup accelerator in Montreal. The platform is now in beta with thousands of active users from more than 130 countries around the globe.

  • Seth’s thinking about quality of communications

    The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about

    Correlation.001
    Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

    Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

    On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).

    Up and down, I’ve charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there’s audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

    To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.

    So, what can you learn here?

    • There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can’t have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.

     

    • The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It’s hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there’s not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren’t interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.

     

    • The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.

     

     

    If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?

    – Seth Godin [Seth’s Blog]

  • Kindle for iPhone

    Amazon Releases Kindle Software for iPhone.

    Glen Fleishmann

    The other shoe has dropped: Amazon late tonight released Kindle for iPhone, a free application that provides access to the catalog of books available for purchase for Amazon’s dedicated hardware device, the Kindle 2. (See “Kindle 2 Improves Design, Not Features,” 2009-02-26, for a review.)

    If you already own or have owned a Kindle books you purchased for that device are automatically shown as available in Kindle for iPhone after you provide your Amazon account name and password. As Amazon has done with media purchases via its Video on Demand service, Kindle books are tied to the account rather than as downloads to a device, as with Apple iTunes purchase.

    Kindle for iPhone doesn’t immediately download all the books you’ve purchased. Instead, they show up in an Archived folder from which you can select which you wish to read on the iPhone.

    You can buy books via Amazon using any Web browser, through the Kindle, or, although Amazon discourages it for reasons of awkwardness, via Safari on the iPhone. Book purchases through any means are available on both Kindle hardware or software.

    The program has the same straightforward and simple approach as the Kindle hardware. You can use a slider to page through the book; an add bookmark button to note the current page; a bookmark button to zoom to particular places in a book or marks you’ve noted; and a text size control.

    Text is quite legible. Unlike the Kindle 2, which force fully justified text across widt seemingly without hyphenation and with strange rivers of white between words at times, the Kindle for iPhone software more sensibly uses flush left justification along with hyphenation, appropriate for a much narrower screen width.


    Amazon uses what it calls Whispersync (a counterpart to its Whispernet download system) to ensure that you find yourself at the same page in the book you left off at if you read among multiple devices. A sync button allows you to make sure that you’ve got the latest page in front of you, too; the software alerts you if your click of the sync button was unnecessary, too.

    The omission of subscriptions to books, magazines, and blogs may be a temporary one, or those absences might avoid issues with Apple about having subscription content pushed to the iPhone as opposed to purchased content.

    Kindle for iPhone is a bit of a game changer. Overnight, 240,000 books are suddenly available for the iPhone through a free application’s conduit. This might also signal that Apple has no plans to enter the electronic book reader market – otherwise, why allow Amazon to set up a beachhead?

     

    Copyright © 2009 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2009 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

    By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]

  • Hal’s Birthday 2001

    HAL’s Pals: Top 10 Evil Computers. To celebrate the 2001 supercomputer’s birthday, Wired.com opens the pod bay doors to reveal Hollywood’s most malevolent thinking machines.

    [Wired Top Stories]

  • Google Earth’s Virtual Prado Museum

    Google Earth’s Virtual Prado Museum.

    Madrid’s Prado Museum has long been a destination for art lovers. In the company of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre Museum in France, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado is home to countless masterpieces of western art. Unfortunately, the options for viewing its contents have always been either hopping a plane to Madrid, or thumbing through printed reproductions that pale in comparison to the original works. Luckily, there’s now a third option with Google Earth’s Prado Museum feature, which offers ultra high resolution photos of 14 of the museum’s masterpieces.

    While the project isn’t an acceptable substitute for seeing the works in person, it is an exceptional upgrade to the sorts of reproductions to which we’ve become accustomed. The images of the 14 works, which include Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, are 14,000 million pixels in size – that’s 1,400 times larger than an image that could be captured by a standard 10 megapixel camera!

  • Ways of Seeing

    Innovative Ways of Seeing: The Art of Social Data

    From BIGTHINK.com

    In the current issue of Contagious Magazine (subscription required), Noah Brier and Faris Yakob of Naked Communications have prepared a tour de force article about the new age of social (meta)data. Data is no longer just boring old data — it is now a wonderfully fluid and shareable construct that is open to a rich number of interpretations (and re-interpretations).

    Prior to Web 2.0, if you mentioned the word “data” to a colleague, you were likely to receive either a blank stare or one of those “please, don’t go there” type of looks.

    Now, thanks to pioneers like Jonathan Harris and Hans Rosling, data is a construct that can be celebrated visually through rich infographics and real-time visualization tools. Anyway – if all this is not so clear – the Contagious Magazine article includes a splendid number of visual examples from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Nikon. (And, of course, examples from the great Edward Tufte.)

    p.s.
    Kudos to Noah & Faris for sneaking in an obscure reference to French Deconstructionist thinker
    Jacques Derrida at the end of the article: “This blending of signifier and signified is peculiarly modern – words have no real connection to the concepts they represent.” Ah, the joys of modern literary theory, updated for Web 2.0!

    – dominicbasulto [Endless Innovation]

    Links

  • Sun, 28 Aug 2005 04:23:34 GMT

    Dave Winer comments on the growth of podcasting and the potential ‘googlisation’ of the new delivery of content.

    I am not so sure they should dismiss Apple so readily. I know Adam Curry can produce for audiences but I think Apple has a much bigger plan/strategy.  If I knew what it was, I would be a wealthy man….

    Dave says:

    A picture named cellSpeaking of the online music biz, here’s why Kleiner-Perkins invested in Podshow. First, a caveat, this is just tea-leave-reading and wild speculation. OK, as reported here in June, Google has an iTunes clone in the works. Probably works great with cell phones, unlike iTunes itself which works great with iPods (of course). KP has the inside track because they have a Google board seat, and Doerr is architecting the whole thing anyway. Enter Podshow, which gets a sweet deal with Google to provide the first apps and content for their iTunes me-too, all the while in bed with Uncle Steve on iTunes. Instant mini-bubble, Podshow goes public, Adam and Ron retire to Miami, and KP pockets the profits.

    Source: Scripting News

     

  • Amassing a Treasury of Photography.

    A Cornell Capa photograph of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy campaigning in Manhattan in 1960.

    Two museums are at work on a project to create one of the largest free databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web. By RANDY KENNEDY.

    Link: Amassing a Treasury of Photography.

  • Google Print

    Front Cover
    Google print is a search engine that allows users to search for books whose content contains a match for your search terms. 

    Link: Google print.